This book was originally published in 1981 and the theme of universals attracted a great deal of attention in the decade preceding publication.

This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to (...) treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Lévi-Strauss's analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison's history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry. (shrink)

Western scholars have speculated for centuries about the perceptual capacities of non-western peoples, of children, and of animals; and, more recently, about the representation and communication of perceptual experience in language. Colour is a particularly intriguing domain within which to study the communication of experience because the physical stimulation necessary for the perception of colour, light radiation, can be specified with precision, and creates an aura of rigour and certainty.

In this response to comments on my article, “The Chimera of Relativism,” in the same issue of *Common Knowledge* , by cognitive neuroscientist Andreas Roepstorff, classicist G. E. R. Lloyd, and anthropologist Martin Holbraad, I illustrate and reinforce Lloyd's cautions regarding the hazards of intercultural—here, Chinese-Western—comparisons in studies of culture and cognition. Examination of a foundational study in East-West cultural/cognitive differences cited by Roepstorff indicates extensive conceptual and methodological problems in that tradition of research. Although Holbraad champions a (...) more radical relativism than that offered in my work, the moves he urges have either been present in my work from the beginning or are both dubiously radical and otherwise undesirable. (shrink)

This essay begins with the story of Vincent Lloyd who recounts a disturbing experience he had while teaching a course to a group of students of color. What does pedagogical uptake under conditions of systemic oppression require of educators? In the first section, I explore philosopher Nancy Potter’s (Nancy Potter. “Giving Uptake”. Social Theory and Practice 26/3 (2000) 479–508; Nancy Potter. The Virtue of Defiance and Psychiatric Engagement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)) work on uptake, whose focus on the (...) mental health field is important because she acknowledges power imbalances. Nevertheless, her understanding of uptake may be insufficient for considering such classroom cases that introduced this essay. The second section shifts the focus of uptake from a psychological approach to a more epistemic understanding of uptake that underscores credibility and intelligibility. Uptake as credibility and intelligibility reveals the everyday patterns of uptake failure that marginalized knowers experience in the socio-epistemic world, described in section three. A recent turn in the scholarship of epistemic injustice towards epistemic agency and resistance is taken up in the subsequent section and applied to the conceptualization of uptake. In the concluding section, I begin to explore how these insights contribute to a notion of pedagogical uptake under conditions of systemic oppression. (shrink)

This piece is a response to Barbara Herrnstein Smith's article, “The Chimera of Relativism: A Tragicomedy,” in the Common Knowledge symposium on “comparative relativism.” The theme is complexity—as distinct from simple contrast or binarism of any kind—similarities as well as differences are observed in ancient Chinese and ancient Greek responses to cultural difference; also the significantly different views of these matters among the Greek philosophers. In the same vein, discussing studies of cultural/linguistic variability or counterclaimed universality among humans in (...) color perception, the essay stresses the complexity of such cognitive activities, including the ongoing interactions among the multiple variables presumably involved. Noting the challenge that such intrinsic complexity and inevitable interactivity present to standard dichotomies of universality and cultural relativity, the essay concludes that these and other familiar dualisms have been made obsolete by a century of research in genetics, ethnography, and related empirical disciplines. (shrink)

Elementary set theory accustoms the students to mathematical abstraction, includes the standard constructions of relations, functions, and orderings, and leads to a discussion of the various orders of infinity. The material on logic covers not only the standard statement logic and first-order predicate logic but includes an introduction to formal systems, axiomatization, and model theory. The section on algebra is presented with an emphasis on lattices as well as Boolean and Heyting algebras. Background for recent research in natural language semantics (...) includes sections on lambda-abstraction and generalized quantifiers. Chapters on automata theory and formal languages contain a discussion of languages between context-free and context-sensitive and form the background for much current work in syntactic theory and computational linguistics. The many exercises not only reinforce basic skills but offer an entry to linguistic applications of mathematical concepts. For upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in theoretical linguistics, computer-science students with interests in computational linguistics, logic programming and artificial intelligence, mathematicians and logicians with interests in linguistics and the semantics of natural language. (shrink)

New AI technologies have the potential to cause unintended harms in diverse domains including warfare, judicial sentencing, biomedicine and governance. One strategy for realising the benefits of AI whilst avoiding its potential dangers is to ensure that new AIs are properly ‘aligned’ with some form of ‘alignment target.’ One danger of this strategy is that – dependent on the alignment target chosen – our AIs might optimise for objectives that reflect the values only of a certain subset of society, and (...) that do not take into account alternative views about what constitutes desirable and safe behaviour for AI agents. In response to this problem, several AI ethicists have suggested alignment targets that are designed to be sensitive to widespread normative disagreement amongst the relevant stakeholders. Authors inspired by voting theory have suggested that AIs should be aligned with the verdicts of actual or simulated ‘moral parliaments’ whose members represent the normative views of the relevant stakeholders. Other authors inspired by decision theory and the philosophical literature on moral uncertainty have suggested that AIs should maximise socially expected choiceworthiness. In this paper, I argue that both of these proposals face several important problems. In particular, they fail to select attractive ‘compromise options’ in cases where such options are available. I go on to propose and defend an alternative, bargaining-theoretic alignment target, which avoids the problems associated with the voting- and decision-theoretic approaches. (shrink)

Cet éditorial a paru le 30 janvier 2022 à l'occasion du 30e anniversaire de la revue Time & Society. Thirty years ago, as founding editor of Time & Society, l set out the challenges for contributors in the Editorial to the first issue. T&S was launched as an international trans-disciplinary journal, primarily straddling the sciences and humanities. This involved taking great care that all published communications connected with readers outside contributors' own - Brèves.

Findings about the desire for health-risk information are heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory. In particular, they seem to be at variance with established psychological theories of information-seeking behavior.The present paper posits the decision about treating illness with medicine as the causal determinant for the expected net value of information, and attempts to explain idiosyncrasies in information-seeking behavior by using the notion of decision sensitivity to incoming information.Furthermore, active information avoidance is explained by modeling the expected emotional distress potentially brought about by (...) “bad news” as a disutility factor in pay-off maximization.In this context two notions of uncertainty are distinguished: an epistemic uncertainty related to the prognostic probability assigned to the risk, and an emotional uncertainty related to the expected damage. Health-risk information can both reduce epistemic and increase emotional uncertainty, giving rise to idiosyncratic processing strategies. (shrink)

In 1753, the Berlin Academy announced that the focus of the prize essay contest of 1755 would be optimism, with entrants required (among other things) ‘to put forward arguments that will be thought most fitting to confirm or destroy this system’. In line with these instructions, entrants submitted essays that were either pro- or anti-optimism. This was to the dismay of one of the judges of the contest, André-Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval (1716–1764), who had, by his own admission, surreptitiously (...) attempted to influence the entrants by sketching out a ‘middle point’ between the polarized pro- and anti-optimist positions in a series of books published between 1754 and 1755, namely Thoughts on Freedom, The Diogenes of d’Alembert, and On Chance under the Rule of Providence. The aim of this essay is to elucidate and historically contextualize Prémontval’s highly original ‘middle point’, as outlined implicitly in the aforementioned books and much more explicitly in a series of essays published after the essay contest had concluded. (shrink)

Our heads are full of representations, according to cognitive science. It might seem inevitable that conscious states are a type of brain-based representation, but in this paper I argue that representation and consciousness each form conceptually distinct domains. Representational content depends on context, usually causal, as shown by familiar cases in which context varies while brain states do not -- twin earth cases and brains-in-vats, for example. But these same cases show that conscious content does not depend on context. The (...) vatted brain, for example, enjoys the same experiences as its in vivo counterpart. The structure of experience -- its parts and their distinctive characters -- is the dynamic structure of the brain, viewed "from within." I call this position methodological phenomenalism (MP), and consider its prospects as a foundation for a science of consciousness. I close with a consideration of MP on the subjective "character" of conscious states. Turning away from representation dissolves the perplexity of subjectivity, leaving hopeful prospects for the scientific study of consciousness. (shrink)

The question posed in the title of this paper is an historical one. I am not, for example, primarily interested in the term 'Platonism' as used by modern philosophers to stand for a particular theory under discussion – a theory, which it is typically acknowledged, no one may have actually held.1 I am rather concerned to understand and articulate on an historical basis the core position of that 'school' of thought prominent in antiquity from the time of the 'founder' up (...) until at least the middle of the 6th century C.E.2 Platonism was unquestionably the dominant philosophical position in the ancient world over a period of more than 800 years. Epicureanism is perhaps the sole major exception to the rule that in the ancient world all philosophers took Platonism as the starting-point for speculation, including those who thought their first task was to refute Platonism. Basically, Platonism sent the ancient philosophical agenda. Given this fact, understanding with some precision the nature of Platonism is obviously a desirable thing for the historian of ancient philosophy. (shrink)

This is an analysis of the philosophy behind the exchange of letters between Descartes and Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia.